HerdsWallet

HerdsWallet is a comprehensive budget application designed to help USF students take control of their finances and helps them achieve their financial goals.

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Inspiration

Let’s be honest, College Students aren’t always the best with money. From going out every weekend to shopping online during class, college students needs to budget better. But knowing how to budget can be a daunting task for some and some may not know where to start. That is where Herds Wallet comes in.

What it does

Herds Wallet is a comprehensive budget application that helps users find a budget that works for them based user specifications and assists with tracking daily expenditures over different periods of times. Herds Wallet is different from other budget applications because Herds Wallet is catered to college students who don’t have much experience with budgeting and Herds Wallet relies on user input to customize a budget.

How we built it

Backend:

  1. Creating a virtual server for communication with the database
  2. Connecting CDB with server using PostGress 3, Creating models to store table of data
  3. Create endpoints for register login and try to authenticate
  4. Redirecting to dashboard when authenticated
  5. Adding users to database
  6. Adding two APIs for user notifications.

Front end:

  1. Creating a multi page routing
  2. Creating all of the forms with input validation
  3. Implementation of several React-Bootstrap components to develop the appearance of the sight
  4. Writing POST requests to work with forms we had made.

Challenges we ran into

Like any team at any hackathon our team faced challenges. As time progressed and we developed our code further, we faced different challenges. The first main challenge was finding a project for the hackathon. Once we decided the topics we began coding. Some challenges that the front end team faced early on was form validation and page routing. Our front end team was able to preserver through this challenge by watching tutorials and applying previous knowledge to this problem. Some of the challenges that our backend team faced was connecting the database from Cockroachdb to our code. Eventually our backend team figured out how to connect the database to our code by using prior experience with Postgres and applying the same knowledge to Cockroachdb. The final challenge that our team faced was connecting our frontend to our backend and this task was partially solved, but the issues that stumped us was the request body was not compatible to the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment that we are proud of is persevering through the challenges we faced and (partially) building our app. Half of our team stayed behind and worked to finish out the code overnight and debug any issues in our code. In the morning, our team encountered the problem of connecting the backend to the frontend. Even though we were not able to create a fully functioning product, we were able to get the majority of the work finished and we were able to persevere past our challenges.

What we learned

This hackathon was a learning experience for all members of our team. The main thing that we learned was working with other people with different skillsets and different backgrounds. Each member of our team had different skillsets and varied experiences so it was important that we knew how to work together and help those who need help. Some other we learned were: How to implement a data base system into our back end code, Styling and Component frameworks for front ends, and the language of Typescript.

What's next for Herds Wallet

There is no such thing as a perfect application. Applications can always be improved and updated to keep up with new technology. Phase 2 for Herds Wallet will consist of maintaining the application and improving the features based on user feedback. Phase 3 for Herds Wallet will be to expand to the IOS and Android Market so that more and more students can use it. Phase 4 for Herds Wallet will be to expand to other schools around the area including U of Tampa, UCF, FSU, U of F, etc.

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